For Your Consideration, The Great Yokai War, Mon Oncle, The River, Fuck, and Miss Austen Regrets

For Your Consideration was a supreme disappointment. After the complete awesomeness of Waiting for Guffman, Best in Show, and A Mighty Wind, not to mention Spinal Tap, For Your Consideration could never live up to that standard. The problem was that it wasn't funny at all. And the satire was hardly biting enough to call it a satire. But it really just comes down to it not being funny. What is funny is my entire review of A Mighty Wind from back in 2003: "I saw A Mighty Wind this evening. Very funny. Best part: Lars. Swedes speaking Yiddish is always funny." That is just as true now as it was then.

The Great Yokai War is Takashi Miike, he of the utterly disgusting everything, making a kids film. It still has it's share of disturbing things, but it's also a basic story of a kid in a bad family situation finding a purpose in a mysterious spirit world. So it's actually a kids film. Clearly Miike's films have allowed him to have a larger budget, even if the CGI was occasionally bad, although this film does quite well with the cartoon-ish feel. Plus, the Sunekosuri (or hamster thing) was ridiculously cute and I want one. I wouldn't be me if I didn't mention how hot pointy-eared Mai Takahashi as Kawahime was, let alone how evil Chiaki Kuriyama (Gogo Yubari and the evil girl in Battle Royal) was. I knew it was going to be a kids film, and I really wanted to see it, due to it's larger budget. I wasn't disappointed.

Mon Oncle was apparently the second film in the M. Hulot series. I did not know that. It was quite funny, and almost a silent film. Some of the set pieces worked considerably better than others, like the wetting of the shopkeeper's clothes works far better than the sister and brother-in-law being stuck in the garage, which relies upon the maid in the 50s being afraid of electricity and yet working in a fully mechanized house. Although it's a slight satire and funny, I have no idea why it won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language film, when there were better films released that year. Although it appears that many did not release in the US that year, like Elevator to the Gallows, Ivan the Terrible: Part II, and The Hidden Fortress. 1958 just apparently sucked for releasing foreign films in the US.

The River was Ming-Liang Tsai's second film to hit it big on the film festival circuit (weirdly, I saw the first one, Vive L'Amour, the sequel to his first film, the day before I started this blog). It's a little disturbing, about a man who acts in a movie scene by floating in a polluted river and then suffers mysterious neck pain. I find it interesting that in this film it's almost always raining when his later films, The Skywalk Is Gone and The Wayward Cloud (which I haven't seen), are set during water shortages. He seems pretty obsessed with water, even if it comes out of his actors.

Fuck is worth watching for Billy Connolly's stories alone. And his voice. He's one of the funniest people alive, and he's a highlight of the film. The rest is an amalgamation of silliness, ridiculous interviews with conservatives (and a non-ridiculous Sam Donaldson) studiously avoiding saying the word fuck, and Ron Jeremy, Tera Patrick, and Evan Seinfeld (listed as singer of Biohazard and husband of Tera Patrick, but not as a porn star himself). Pretty enjoyable, and the FPM (fucks per minute) was higher than I was expecting, although the Fuck Counter was counting the fucks on screen along with all the ones said. Which was disappointing. You may have noticed that I've used fuck more times in this post than in all my other posts combined. In fact, I only used fuck once in a post that wasn't just quoting a title or a line from a movie: this complaint about the Raise the Red Lantern DVD. Apparently, I decided not to censor myself over that, but I generally do otherwise. Because poor quality DVDs are a blight on society.

Miss Austen Regrets is probably better than Becoming Jane, but I still get this feeling that it's still a tarted up version of her life. I could always just ask my Janeite friend, but I prefer to just assume. I liked Olivia Williams, but Imogen Poots (heh) and her face bothered me immensely. I didn't realize there was a big gap in the Complete Jane Austen, as it's still a couple weeks before the next new one. So rewatching the BBC version of Pride and Prejudice is my next goal.

Also, 400th post. Yayz.